Thursday, November 17, 2005

Perpetual effort for perpetual ignorance

...The producer of a new documentary on Saddam Hussein says
there is no question that the deposed Iraqi dictator
possessed weapons of mass destruction. The question, he
says, should be: where did the WMDs go? Former real estate
broker Brad L. Maaske interviewed dozens of Iraqis in
producing his DVD Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Murderous
Reign of Saddam Hussein. He says it is absurd that the
American Left continues to get away with their claims that
the former dictator did not possess WMDs. "There's interview
after interview of people who say they saw truckloads of
something going out through Syria and into the Bekaa Valley
of Lebanon," he recalls. "And of course we've tried to track
that as best we can. The U.S. military can't go into Syria;
it can't go into Lebanon. But the question is, where did
those weapons go?" Maaske says it does not take much to
create a weapon of mass destruction. "There didn't have to
be massive stockpiles of chemicals," he explains. "A few
55-gallon drums of a nerve gas could kill a million people
if properly dispersed, so it's not that difficult for him to
get rid of what he had." Maaske says U.S. officials
discovered that more than one-third of the WMDs turned over
by Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi came from Iraq.

We know that Saddam Hussein did have WMD -- we have the
receipts. (Anyone know the origin of that joke?) Why does
the American Left claim that Hussein had no WMDs at the time
of the invasion? Because the president's hand-picked search
teams found nothing. Because report after report has come to
the same conclusion: Hussein lacked weapons of mass
destruction at the time of the invasion. It's reality; deal
with it.

One other point on 55 gallon drums of this and that. A
few 55 gallon drums of lots of things could kill a million
people if "properly dispersed". Bullets dispersed through
skulls. Rat poison dispersed through middle school cafeteria
taco meat. Mercury dispersed through the fish we eat. Pick
your poison.

9 Comments:

Never mind the fact they didn't have a delivery mechanism to get the damn stuff to anywhere important.

Well, be careful with your arguements. It doesn't take much of a delivery system to deliver some pretty nasty stuff - assuming, of course, that they had it in the first place. It's fine to point out incorrect facts and incorrect conclusions based thereon, but don't go overboard with your condemnation. It weakens your argument.I'm as tired of hysteria from the left as I am of hysteria from the right.

I'm going to stand by my post, TRR. The Agape item isn't just claiming that Hussein had chemical weapons, but also implies that Hussein could've used those weapons to kill millions of people. Hussein was closer to slipping strychnine into the lunch line than he was to spraying nerve gas via unmanned aerial drones.

Hysteria? Be careful? Weakens my argument? What the hell are you talking about?

I know exactly what I am talking about: military targeting. You can't just open up a barrel of this stuff or spray it with a hose.

The point here is that it does take one hell of a delivery system to deliver this stuff. Not only that, but it takes massive amounts of training to properly deliver the load. If you don't know what you're doing, the stuff simply doesn't work all that well (see sarin in Tokyo).

The only thing hysterical about talk concerning delivery systems is that the administration floated the honest-to-god idea that Saddam could deliver this stuff via a wooden drone.

Hysteria? Get out of here. They didn't have the capability to threaten us with WMD even if they had them in the first place.

If you define things down far enough every nation in the world possesses WMD. An irate Costa Rican dropping diseased cows out of a Cesna shouldn't be reason enough for a preemptive strike on Central America.

And of course the right hates the thought that Iraq's last major WMD stash was destroyed in a bombing run in 1998 since that would mean that Bill Clinton might get some credit for it. Saddam certainly wanted WMDs, it's just that thanks to the first gulf war and continued action after that he had lost pretty much any capacity to acquire them by the time W was in office. (And some of us, TRR included, are old enough to remember how Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear plant several decades ago. In retrospect a pretty good idea. Bonus points to Joseph, or anyone else, who can name the Bob Dylan song that alludes to that event.)

Hey, I am not saying that there were WMDs. My point is simply that you should not screw up a perfectly good argument by adding one that is isn't. (Don't know if I'm old enough, Jambo, but my sister surely is)

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